by Jorge Werthein, Senior Advisor to the Director General, Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture
In the American football final — one of the most powerful media showcases on the planet — the spectacle usually yields to the technological brilliance, consumption, and epic nature of the cultural industry.
However, the opening of Bad Bunny’s show chose another entry point: images of sugarcane fields, farm workers under the sun, cultivated land. In a matter of seconds, the biggest sporting stage of the year connected with a question that rarely enters global prime time: who ultimately sustains the economic stability and daily life of our societies?
It was not a neutral setting. It was a symbolic statement. In the dominant global culture, the agricultural sector rarely takes centre stage. Grand narratives are constructed from an urban perspective; agriculture appears as a silent backdrop, despite being an economic and social pillar.
In a context of trade tensions, price shocks, and vulnerable supply chains, this invisibility is becoming increasingly unsustainable: food production is once again — as it should be — a matter of security and stability.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, more than 40 million people work in agriculture, representing around 14% of total regional employment. This figure reveals the structural magnitude of the sector: it feeds, exports, generates foreign exchange, and sustains territories. And yet, culturally, it is rarely associated with prestige, innovation, or the future. The choice of sugarcane is no accident. In the Caribbean and much of Latin America, this crop encapsulates economic history, cultural identity, and social memory. Showcasing agricultural work on a global stage is equivalent to reclaiming deep roots: contemporary well-being continues to have a material, rural, and often invisible origin.
There is also an unavoidable generational dimension. The region faces rapid rural ageing and persistent youth migration to cities. Rural youth, with unequal access to financing, innovation, and connectivity, are often left out of sustained public policies. This absence is not insignificant: without generational renewal, productive continuity is compromised, territorial cohesion is weakened, and social gaps are widened. That is why the cultural gesture takes on greater significance. When a global artist places the rural worker at the centre of their narrative, they expand the symbolic space of the countryside and challenge an entrenched cultural hierarchy: one that assumes that modernity is only written in urban terms.
It was not a technical discourse or an ideological proclamation. It was an image. And images, in a society saturated with stimuli, can be more eloquent than a report. From an international perspective, the message connects with a strategic reality.
Food security is no longer a sectoral issue, but a central component of the global debate on stability, trade, inflation, and economic resilience. Agri-food systems have become critical pieces of the international balance. And those systems depend, first and foremost, on people: farmers, rural workers, entire communities.
Perhaps many viewers saw only an aesthetic or poetic introduction. But that beginning brought to the forefront what usually remains outside the frame. The most powerful spectacle on the sporting calendar began, symbolically, in a sugarcane field. Modernity is not opposed to agriculture. On the contrary, it depends on it. And when pop culture decides to start in the countryside, it not only changes an aesthetic: it opens a conversation about the dignity of work, territorial inequality, and a productive future. In Latin America and the Caribbean, that conversation is not nostalgic. It is strategic.
